A Box Full of Toys

(3 mins read)

In our house, there is a big box that almost nobody opens.

It sits in a corner, full of what three childhoods have left behind. A few broken cars. Rubber ducks that once went into the bathtub with a baby. Some ping-pong balls. Most of it came from my eldest, who is nine now. Not one thing in that box would probably be called a “good toy” today.

Real play happens somewhere else. My kids use whatever is near them: a couple of cars, the dinosaurs, some Lego mini figures. My nine-year-old has moved even further away, to his tablet, his PlayStation, his sketches and watercolors. The box is probably the last place anyone looks.

The evening the box opens

But every few weeks, someone is in the mood. They walk over to the box, and the unpacking begins.

One toy at a time. Each one is held up and examined, and a memory comes with it. Where it was bought. How it broke. Who cried when it broke. Then it goes back, carefully, as if it might break again.

I watch from a distance and feel a little relieved, without being entirely sure why.

Their mother sometimes suggests clearing it out. It's a fair point. If nobody plays with them, why keep them? The kids answer with one word: no.

What the box is really for

I used to think it was just storage. Now I think it is an archive.

Those toys are not particularly valuable as toys anymore. They are valuable as evidence. A car with one wheel reminds us that a certain afternoon happened. A faded duck brings back bath times that now feel very far away.

I work with data, so this makes me pause. If I measured that box by usage, it would score close to zero. Low engagement, remove it. Most dashboards would probably agree. But usage only tells you how often something is touched. It doesn't necessarily tell you how much it matters.

“Do our toys wake up at night?”

After watching Toy Story, my kids asked questions that probably deserve more respect than a quick “no, silly.” Do their toys wake up when they sleep? What do the toys talk about when nobody is around?

I didn't have an answer. But I've thought about it since. If the toys in that box did wake up, I don't think they would complain about being ignored. I imagine they would talk about being there at the beginning.

What I am taking from it

• Value and use are different things. Some of the most important objects in our lives are probably the ones we touch least.

• Memory needs something to hold. Kids remember with their hands. Adults aren't so different. Think of an old ticket stub, or a shirt we just can't seem to give away.

• Broken doesn't necessarily mean finished. My kids never judge a toy by its condition. I sometimes wish I were as kind to my own cracked, abandoned things.

• Let children decide what to keep. Their “no” might just be a small act of holding on to their own story.

I haven't cleared the box. I don't think I will.

One day, my kids will probably have a box of their own, in some corner, unopened for weeks. And on an ordinary evening, one of them will walk over and lift the lid.

I wonder what is in mine, and when I last opened it.

My Last 3 Reads, and Their Ratings

(4 mins read) 

If you average my last three Goodreads ratings, you get 3.3 out of 5. A perfectly ordinary reading month.

But that number hides quite a bit. One of these books I rated 5 stars. Another got 2. And I felt very different things while reading each of them.

The one that hurt: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama by Nathan Thrall (5 stars)

The story is built around a school bus accident. Several young children died, and one of them was Abed Salama’s son.

What stayed with me first wasn’t the accident itself, but everything around it.

The book shows Palestinians as people living their lives. They raise children, build relationships, and find small moments of happiness, all while the occupation shapes almost every part of their daily existence. I realised how rarely I get to see this side of their lives. Most of what I read about Palestinians comes through headlines, statistics, and political arguments.

As the story unfolds, you begin to see how much of what led to that day was preventable. The restrictions, the discrimination, the neglect, the unequal treatment. None of these caused the accident directly, but they made everything surrounding it, and everything that followed, so much harder to bear.

The title speaks of one day, but the book stretches across decades of history. At times, this made it feel less focused than I expected. But I also understood why that history was necessary. You cannot fully understand the tragedy without understanding the system around it.

The hardest part came at the end. So little has changed, and in many ways, things may have become worse. The grief is personal, but the injustice is systemic.

I gave it five stars. Not because I enjoyed reading it. I didn’t, and I don’t think that’s the point. I gave it five stars because stories like this need to be heard, remembered, and taught.

The one I wanted to love: My Friends by Fredrik Backman (2 stars)

I adore Fredrik Backman. And that’s probably why My Friends disappointed me so much.

It has almost everything he usually does well: friendship, grief, trauma, quirky characters, art, and big emotional moments. But for me, it felt like a book trying very hard to mean something. And somewhere along the way, I could see the effort.

The friendship was my biggest problem. Four teenagers who remain so emotionally central to each other 25 years later, remembering their teenage years in extraordinary detail? I’m 37, and I can barely reconstruct what I was doing at 15.

Then there’s the painting. The entire story treats it as something almost sacred. I understand what Backman is trying to say about art, memory, and belonging. But I never quite felt it. It seemed less like the painting naturally carried all that meaning and more like the story needed it to, so everyone had to act accordingly.

In fairness, I listened to most of the book as an audiobook at the gym. Maybe I missed something between sets. But even after accounting for that, I finished with one thought: Was that it?

I know it has a 4.4 rating from hundreds of thousands of readers. Clearly, it worked for a lot of people. I’m just not one of them, and that’s fine. You can love an author and still not love one of their books.

The one written in letters: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (3 stars)

The story is told entirely through letters. I liked how the book trusted me to piece Sybil’s life together on my own. That was probably its biggest strength.

The first half felt slow, though, and I struggled to connect with Sybil. The writing is lovely, and the book handles ageing, love, and loss with care. But the ending felt a little too neat and a little too hopeful for the life that came before it.

And there was one question that followed me through the entire book.

The story takes place somewhere between 2015 and 2020. There were phones. There was WhatsApp. There were text messages and DMs. So why on earth was everyone writing letters?

Sybil could have saved everyone a lot of postage with one phone call.

If you have a good answer to this, I would genuinely like to hear it.

What the stars were really measuring

Looking back, I realise my ratings weren’t measuring the same thing.

The 5 wasn’t about enjoyment. It was about how much a book matters.

The 2 wasn’t about bad writing. It was about the distance between what I expected and what I actually felt.

The 3 was about admiring something without quite connecting with it.

We use stars to rate books, but they can only tell you so much. They squeeze very different reactions into the same five boxes, making them look more comparable than they really are.

The part I should say plainly

I wouldn’t recommend the last two books, at least not without a few caveats.

I read My Friends and The Correspondent mostly because everyone seemed to be reading them. The ratings were high, the reviews were warm, and my feed kept putting them in front of me. So I went with the trend.

The first book was different. I picked it on purpose, and it was the one I’ll remember.

I work with data, so I should have known better. A 4.4 average tells you how a crowd felt. It can’t tell you how you will.

This Too Shall Pass - The Good and the Bad

(2 mins read) 

Some evenings are just good. Dinner is warm, everyone is laughing, and we are enjoying each other’s company. And then, out of nowhere, a quiet thought walks in: This will not last.

I get that thought on bad days too, and there, it helps. “This too shall pass” is a decent friend on an off day. But it works both ways. It also shows up during the good days and quietly steals a little of their shine.

For a while, I saw this as a flaw in me. Why couldn’t I just enjoy a happy moment without thinking about its end? Now, I think it is simply an honest reminder of how the dunya works.

Nobody gets a life free of grief or fear. That kind of peace belongs to the Hereafter. Not even the wealthy or the wise are spared. Allah SWT has created us in a way that makes us experience both joy and sorrow. No amount of money, knowledge, or success can completely take that away.

So, the question is not how to escape the thought. It is how to live with it.

Hold good days with open hands. The tighter we try to hold on to a happy moment, the more we risk losing it twice, first to worry, and then to time. Notice it, say Alhamdulillah, and let it be what it is.

Treat bad days like a long Test match. Nobody writes off the match at lunch on Day 1. A bad session is not the final result. Give it time. The game is still on.

Don’t wait for permanence. If nothing lasts forever, then this hour, this meal, this conversation is worth being fully present for. Impermanence is not a reason to feel less. It is a reason to appreciate what we have while we have it.

Maybe that is the real gift in the saying. It does not ask us to stop feeling. It asks us to stop clinging.

The joy will pass. So will the worry.

What stays is how we carried both.

When AI Knows Everything, What Is Left to Learn?

(3 mins read)

Why should a child memorize the capital of Estonia when AI can answer it in two seconds?

(It’s Tallinn. You didn’t need to memorize that either.)

It’s a fair question. And it sits at the heart of a TEDx talk by Kristina Kallas, Estonia’s Minister of Education and Research.

She says AI is not just a technology problem. It challenges something much deeper: what are our brains actually for?

The brain likes it easy

Kallas starts with biology. The brain is one of the biggest energy consumers in our body, so naturally, it prefers low-effort thinking: memorizing, understanding, applying.

If you have read Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, this will sound familiar. There is System 1, the autopilot mode. And then there is System 2, which handles deeper analysis, judgment, and original thinking. System 2 works well, but it is tiring. Think about how you feel after a difficult exam. Sometimes your brain feels more exhausted than your body.

The trap

And here is the problem. Schools have mostly trained you for easy mode. And the easy mode is exactly what AI does best. So if AI can handle the remembering, the routine problem-solving, and even some of the thinking for us, and our brains are happy to let it, we can slowly slide into what Kallas calls cognitive offloading. Her blunter term for it is “brain rot.” She compares this moment to the printing press. Once books became widely available, people had to learn to read. AI is creating a similar kind of pressure. The skills that were enough before may no longer be enough.

What Estonia is trying

Kallas argues that schools need to focus more on higher-order skills: deep analysis, systems thinking, ethical judgment and real creativity. These are the things AI cannot easily replace.

Estonia’s AI Leap program puts a Socratic-style AI tutor into schools, starting with upper secondary students. It doesn’t simply hand over the answers. It asks questions back. A good cricket coach works in much the same way. He doesn’t bat for you. He keeps bowling that tricky delivery until you learn how to play it.

So how do we motivate our kids?

I don’t think lectures about “the future” will work. Kids can smell those from a distance. What might work instead is changing what we reward at home.

These are my own ideas, not Kallas’s:

• Ask “What do you think?” before showing them the answer.

• Let them argue with AI and find where it is wrong.

• Praise the hard thinking, not just the speed of finishing.

The goal is to make the effortful mode feel normal. Maybe even a little satisfying. Not something they always try to escape from.

The question that stays

So, back to Tallinn. Knowing the answer was never really the point. The point was always what we do with it. Maybe the real question is not what AI cannot do. It is what we are still willing to do the hard way. And our children will be watching how we answer that question.

Learning to Code Still Matters in a World That Doesn't Need You to Code

(2 mins read)

A few weeks ago, someone on my team shared a SQL script with me. It ran perfectly. The problem was that it gave the wrong answer.

She had used AI to write a tricky part of the query and had checked that it executed without errors. When I asked her to walk me through the logic, she struggled.

It wasn't because she wasn't capable. She simply hadn't spent enough time with the problem to really understand what was happening.

That incident made me think about the ongoing debate around AI and coding.

If AI can write code, do we still need to learn how to code?

I think we do.

AI can remove a lot of the typing. It can help us write code faster, debug it, and even suggest better approaches. But it doesn't remove the need to think.

Someone still needs to understand whether the logic actually makes sense. Someone needs to spot the bug hiding inside code that looks perfectly fine. And someone needs to recognise when AI is confidently giving the wrong answer.

That requires understanding, not just good prompting.

I've started looking at coding differently. Coding was never really about remembering syntax. It was about taking a messy problem and breaking it down into small, precise steps.

Think of it like explaining a recipe to a robot that has no common sense. You can't simply say, "Add a little salt." You have to tell it how much, when to add it, and what should happen next.

That ability to translate human thinking into something precise is the real skill. Python, SQL, or even plain English are simply different ways of communicating with a machine.

And there is some interesting research around this too. An Anthropic study found that developers who relied heavily on AI for writing and debugging performed worse on a later test of their understanding than those who worked through the problems themselves. (source)

That made me reflect on my own kids too.

They are growing up in a world where answers are available almost instantly. I don't want them to miss the thinking simply because the answer is easy to get.

I'd rather they learn to think through a problem first, understand the "why", and then use AI to become faster.

Because the machine will always type faster than us.

But knowing whether what it typed is actually right?

That part is still ours.